Since Wedge is 5.3+, maybe it's safe to simply up the min reqs to 5.4..?

The main advantage is the ability is use [ ] instead of array( ) inside the code. It's really just that.I could also modify Subs-CachePHP.php to automatically replace [ ] with array() as needed. I can't be arsed for now.

I just checked, and 5.3+ is supported by ~90% of the user base, and 5.4+ by ~70%... Hmm. Then again-- what we care about is the current userbase, as I've long given up on turning Wedge into a popular engine. It's just the cool engine that people in the know use.

Anyway, I'm likely to go for PHP 5.4 + some support for PHP 5.3, but I can't be arsed to code said support for now. ;)

Since Wedge is 5.3+, maybe it's safe to simply up the min reqs to 5.4..?

Well PHP 5.3 is by far the slowest PHP version,PHP 5.4 and PHP 5.5 are slightly faster,(all approaching end of life and upgrading is advisable),PHP 5.6 however is the old stable version,so i would say minimum recommended PHP 5.6

I guess we can safely increase it to 5.6 even if we should recommend php7 just because it's noticeable faster. Sure, the thing with php versions is always the slow upgrade of webspace providers but do we have to care about them? Do we have the manpower to support old/outdated php versions? Does it even make sense?

I'd started doing something quick'n'dirty in just two lines of code, but then it started getting complicated, even with just two lines, so I give up for now. :P

I'd rather stick to the lowest 'acceptable' version that Wedge actually supports.If I start asking for a higher version, I'll start using "??" as a replacement to "?:" (basically removes the need to do an isset() call), and then I'll start wondering if I shouldn't ask for PHP 7.1 support so that I can do [$foo, $bar] = func(); instead of list ($foo, $bar) = func(), but I'm NOT actually using list() much in Wedge, so who cares about that... :P

Well yeah, so I guess PHP 5.4 is doable, just hoping that no one currently using Wedge will be locked out of it. I'm surprised no one replied to the poll though. ^^

Backward compatibility is evil and leads to drastic consequences. I've created a new account to post this because of its evil. Since this topic is about 5.4, I'll choose 5.4 here, but if I were in your place, I would've simply dropped PHP 5 and required PHP 7.

PHP becomes comparable (and even better in some cases) to other scripting languages after the PHP 7 mark. It is also supposed to be much faster. PHP 5 in all its glory feels like a weak language. Not weak as in weakly typed, but weak because it feels like a toy language. You'll get more work done overall with PHP 7 in a shorter amount of time.

An additional benefit is to encourage others to upgrade their PHP versions which, whether they realize it or not, is for their own good.

It's not *much* faster in the case of Wedge. It is definitely faster, but not noticeably so, I'd say. I compared both PHP versions with it.I absolutely recommend that everyone upgrades to PHP 7.x, of course.But Wedge is based off SMF, which itself, at the time of forking, was compatible with PHP 4... So I started by making it PHP 5-only, then PHP 5.3, then PHP 5.4... I'm basing my assumptions off https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all, and as you can see by going 5.4+ I cut myself off from potentially ~25% of all PHP users. It was already a bold move....Going 7.x+ only will cut me off from 95% of all PHP users. That's not something I can do, obviously. I still have some hope that Wedge will eventually make itself known as one of the better free platforms.